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The Last Enchantment
Newly available after 40 years, this partly autobiographical love affair with the Jamaican language and landscape gives a penetrating look at the racial politics of the 1950s and 1960s and the search for self in a world divided by class. Ramsay Tull is witness to the black racial discontents and the desire for national independence that are threatening the old colonial order; but when a chance comes to study at Oxford University, he becomes immersed in European literary culture and Marxism. On his return to Jamaica, Ramsay becomes actively involved in radical nationalist politics and begins his second journey, away from his middle-class origins and back to a true appreciation of the Jamaican people.
Fugue and Other Poems
This collection reasserts the significant work of the writer and intellectual Neville Dawes, whose poetry has been unavailable since the late 1950s. A lifelong Marxist and a lover of English literature, Dawes’s concern for the rural Jamaican working class is evident in the poems that celebrate his youth in the village of Sturge Town, Jamaica. Written between 1950 and 1970, these inspiring poems show that the strength provided by heritage can overcome the difficulties posed by the social and political hardships of modern life. An introduction and several poems written by Dawes's son, Kwame Davis, are also included.
Fugue and Other Writings
This collection of work by the late Neville Dawes (1926-1984) makes available the fine poems that Dawes wrote, mostly between 1950-1970, some of which appeared in a long-vanished, slim volume, Sepia, published in Ghana in the late 1950s. In the poems, the Marxist, modernist, ideologically committed Neville Dawes returns again and again to Sturge Town, the village of his youth, a world of "ancestral rooting". The collection includes the short stories broadcast on the Caribbean Voices radio programme, justly hailed as special events by such stern editors as Edgar Mittelholzer. There are several pieces of autobiographical writing, which in their insight and humour make one wish that Dawes had w...
Natural Mysticism
Dawes takes an in-depth look at reggae as an artistic form, exploring how reggae is both uniquely Jamaican and a music of world wide appeal. His writing communicates his infectious enthusiasm for his subject.
A Place to Hide
A man lies in a newspaper-lined room dreaming an other life. Bob Marley's spirit flew into him at the moment of the singer's death. A woman detaches herself from her perfunctory husband and finds the erotic foreplay she longs for in journeying round the island. A man climbs Blue Mountain Peak to fly and hear the voice of God. Sonia paints her new friend Joan and hopes that this will be the beginning of a sexual adventure. Dawes's characters are driven by their need for intimate contact with people and with God, and their need to construct personal myths powerful enough to live by. In a host of distinctive and persuasive voices they tell stories that reveal their inner lives and give an incis...
Requiem
In these 'shrines of remembrance' for the millions of the victims of transatlantic slavery, Kwame Dawes constructs a sequence which laments, rages, mourns, but also celebrates survival. Focusing on individual moments in this holocaust which lasted nearly four hundred years, these poems both cauterize a lingering infection and offer the oil of healing. In these taut lyric pieces, Dawes achieves what might seem impossible: saying something fresh about a subject which, despite attempts at historical amnesia, will not go away. He does it by eschewing sentimentality, rant or playing to the audience, black or white. His poems go to the heart of the historical experience and its contemporary reverberations. This sequence was inspired by the award-winning book, The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo by the American artist Tom Feelings.
Wisteria
"In Wisteria, Kwame Dawes finds poignant meaning in the landscape and history of Sumter, a small town in central South Carolina. Here the voices of women who lived through most of the twentieth century - teachers, beauticians, seamstresses, domestic workers and farming folk - unfold with the raw honesty of people who have waited for a long time to finally speak their mind. The poems move with the narrative of stories long repeated but told with fresh emotion each time, with the lyrical depth of a blues threnody or a negro spiritual, and with the flame and shock of a prophet forced to speak the hardest truths. These are poems of beauty and insight that pay homage to the women who told Dawes t...
Tangling with the Epic
The third in a quartet of poem-dialogues between Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella, begun in 2015 with the critically acclaimed 'Speak From Here to There' (2016), and followed by 'A New Beginning' (2018), Tangling With The Epic explores commonalities and difference, the results reminding us of how poetry can offer comfort and solace, and how it can ignite a peculiar creative frenzy that enriches.
Impossible Flying
Dawes' most personal and universal collection, 'telling family secrets to strangers'. The family secrets focus primarily on the triangular relationship between the poet, his father and younger brother.
Talk Yuh Talk
In the past 30 years, most Caribbean poetry written in English has come to the US in the lyrics of reggae music, but that is only one aspect of a tradition characterized by continuing tension within a diverse heritage. Interviews in this collection reflect a range of Caribbean voices from several generations, from those poets influenced by a dynamic interplay between the popular culture of reggae music and yard theater to those whose work is closer to classical forms of literature and oral narrative. Dawes teaches English at the University of South Carolina. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
